Each year, beginning sometime around Super Bowl Sunday, out of the woodwork come the “Get ready for spring cleaning now!” articles.

You can’t surf the Internet without running into one.

“Make your spring cleaning a snap in 44 easy steps!”

“It’s spring cleaning time (or at least it will be six weeks from now)!”

(Exclamation points added to convey urgency, and are not intended to accurately portray the competency of copy editors).

In addition to housecleaning — which, based on what I can gather, everyone does only once every 12 months — there are expert guides to lawn and garden preparation.

“10 tips to get your lawn mower ready!”

“Plan your garden today!”

“Start failing to curtail dandelions again this year — immediately!”

A couple months of that, and I’m exhausted from thinking about all the work that awaits.

All this to-do about to-doing is bad for a person like me, who has a tendency to feel guilt about his lazy side as it is. Frequent reminders just turn into self-fulfilling situations.

“I’ll never be motivated enough to follow all these guidelines,” I’ll think. “Might as well sell our rakes online at Sell-your-rakesonline.com.”

I don’t even have to read an entire article. One glance at a headline, and I start worrying about jobs I may not even attempt to accomplish.

Funny thing is, once I get rolling, I actually enjoy spring tasks. Washing window is OK. No, that was not intended to be plural.

Sometimes, I wish I had found a career niche in home-improvement journalism. If I had done it well enough for long enough, I might have made enough money to hire people to do tasks I hate, as a result of being good at telling people how to perform work that I do poorly.

But like anything else, the grass is greener on the other side of that non-working hedge-trimmer. Had I pursued the home-writer path, I’d be complaining about something else in this week’s column. It would have begun this way:

What’s worse than spring cleaning?

Writing about it.

Dennis Volkert is features editor at the Sturgis Journal. Contact him at volkert@sturgisjournal.com.